Review of Turkish Airlines flight Ankara → Istanbul in Economy

Hi,

welcome to this report on TK's A330 between Ankara and Istanbul. This is the 3rd leg of this 4 segment trip I took with my best friend in September 2023.

After a nice of visits in Ankara, we headed back to the airport. This bus runs every 15 minutes between Ankara and ESB and takes around 40 minutes for 25 TL (0.80€).

We reach Ankara Airport a little before 19:00.

The terminal is quite modern.

I got a boarding pass out of the self service check-in counter.

Let's head to the CIP Terminal.

There are actually two lounges here: The Classic Plus/Elite Lounge and the Elite Plus/Business Lounge.

Nice logo tbh

The lounge isn't huge but is big enough for the crowd on this monday evening:

Food option isn't that good: no hot meal, there's just some salads and a soup.

Boarding was slightly delayed due to the late arrival of our aircraft.
As in Istanbul, boarding takes place directly in the lounge.

And we get a ride in a bus for like 150 meters…

Here's our aircraft for the night, an A330-200, TC-JIO.

My seat, 6A.

Cabin is of course equipped with IFEs.

Seat pitch is better than on TK's medium-haul fleet, yet not the best I ever experienced.

Another flight, another safety card :)

Cabin gets ready quite quickly, although it was quite full.

A pillow on a 45-min domestic flight? That's awesome!

45 minutes flight time tonight to Istanbul.

We leave the gate at 21:03, 23 minutes behind schedule.

The safety video and the ad were shown on the screens.

And after a quick taxi to the runway…

We left Ankara at 21:20.

Some of the small towns around Ankara:

Ankara by night:

Quickly enough the crew handed out some cheese-tomato-basil sandwiches and some water.

The cabin remained seated during the whole flight.

to be fair, it's quite fast and we're already approaching Istanbul, here at Gebze, along the Sea of Marmara.

and the Prince's Islands.

Istanbul

Soon enough, we landed at Istanbul Airport, at 22:02.

Taxi was again quite long…

but we got to see some very unusual planes :)

We reached our parking spot at 22:15, 15 minutes behind schedule.

Thanks for flying with TK!

We disembarked quite quickly after Business Class got off the plane.

We were then transferred to the terminal by bus and headed out to the metro station.

it's located around 10 mins away from the terminal.

The metro ride takes 25 minutes to Kaghitane, where we had to change to another metro line and then onto another one until we reached the old town. Quite a journey to be honest, but worth it at only 45 TL (1,40€) instead of 750+ TL with a cab…

Thanks for reading!
See you soon for the last report :)
Jules